With the development of electronic technology, vehicles and associated technology are rapidly changing as an aggregate of the most advanced scientific technology. As various additional functions based on electronic control and video information beginning to be installed within vehicles, the amount of data transmitted over an internal communication network is also rapidly changing.
As a result, in the case of using the conventional control area network (CAN) communication network having a transfer rate of about 500 kbps, internal units of each vehicle may have difficulty in properly handling the amount of transmission/reception data in the long run. Accordingly, Ethernet communication is being intensively discussed and developed as a stable communication scheme for next-generation vehicle networks.
In the meantime, in the case of applying the Ethernet communication to a vehicle internal network (hereinafter referred to as a vehicle-embedded network), since the Ethernet communication has a data transfer rate of about 100 M˜1 G bps, the network can be stably and reliably implemented without any problems, but it is necessary to consider Internet Protocol (IP) setting between communication units. A user must start and stop the engine of a vehicle whenever the IP is established between the communication units. As a result, the user may have difficulty allocating/managing IP in the vehicle. That is, if a dynamic address is used, the degree of freedom of the network is increased, however, the start up time is increased. In contrast, if a static address, network flexibility is decreased but the start-up time is also decreased.
All constituent components installed in the vehicle start normal operation as soon as a start-up key operates. In case of using the dynamic address, an excessively-long network start up time (for example, about 10 seconds) is required for initial startup. Some conventional enterprises have also considered static address allocation despite the static address allocation problems in which flexibility is deteriorated and an address must be independently managed for each constituent component of the vehicle.
However, assuming that four cameras mounted to front, rear, right and left sides of the vehicle are coupled to the Ethernet communication network, in case of the static address allocation, an IP must be allocated to each of the four cameras. If any one of the four cameras is out of order, a user must search for constituent components, addresses of which are allocated to the corresponding camera, and replace it with another, resulting in low compatibility and increased user inconvenience.
In addition, a network server must “pre-recognize” all information related to a node to be connected to the network. Thus, there are still many problems and restrictions associated with actual network management in CAN networks.